Cheap Vs. Expensive Wine Taste Test [Video]

Apparently, neither can these guys from BuzzFeed, who recently took on the challenge of determining the price tag of a wine bottle just by tasting its contents. Watch this hilarious viral video of BuzzFeed staffers as they get tipsy for views, all the while trying to differentiate cheap and expensive wines.

While many of us only pretend to know how to distinguish the difference between a thousand-dollar Vega Sicilla and the two-dollar-a-bottle “purple” wine they serve at highway diners, there are actually professionals who are paid good money to know the intricate difference. These “experts” range from wine aficionados to actual academic experts whose careers are built entirely on inspecting wine quality and character.

However, recent blind studies suggest that these expert “wine connoisseurs” may just be as clueless as the rest of us when it comes to knowing good and fancy wine.

An experiment done on winemakers and experts reveal that those who profess to be skilled with judging and inspecting wine quality were grossly inconsistent when presented with the same type of wine, with just the presentation altered, over and over again. Robert Hodgson, a California winemaker who conducted the experiment, says “the results are disturbing. Only about 10 [percent] of judges are consistent and those judges who were consistent one year were ordinary the next year.”

“Chance has a great deal to do with the awards that wines win,” he adds.